


You And Me At the End of the World

by AceQueenKing



Category: Original Work
Genre: Accidental time travel into apocalyptic future, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:54:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24355402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/pseuds/AceQueenKing
Summary: The world's first reconstituted Stegosaurus and the world's first time machine left Harvard to find a future where they wouldn't be gawked at. It was only a matter of time until the world caught up with Harvard, and there were thousands of dinosaur lawyers and time machines, and the time machine had the means to skip to that point. So they tried.What they found instead, of course, was the apocolypse.
Relationships: Time Traveling Dinosaur with a Degree from Harvard Law & Sentient Time Travel Machine
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11
Collections: Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	You And Me At the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quin/gifts).



Inqera Iekruju Stegosaurus Stenops, Esq., slammed the door as the Materializing Utility For Future Years (or, as she preferred to think of herself, Muffy) finished re-calibrating the computational time matrix. It was now 2525 CE, and Muffy was most happy to have finally deduced that. It had taken 5.29 minutes to do. Ingera had bickered such was wasted effort but clearly it had not been, judging by Ingera's fast stomping up to Muffy's control room. Surely she'd barely gone five minutes outside the station on this voyage, attempted to buy a cup of tea (or whatever it was sentients ate — Muffy preferred the energy picked up by her refined solar sails, personally), and had been laughed stupid when she could not calculate the year in order to do her computations. Everyone knows all calculations began with the base time that had passed since 1 January 1970. Or at least, Muffy did.

"Floor it!" Ingera yelled, her own voice barely audible over the stomp of her feet. "Come on! We gotta get out of here! Move it, you bucket of bolts!"

Muffy trained her optical sensors upon Ingera. It noticed, with some discomfort, that Ingera was bleeding from her left flank — a sort of crude, wooden object had been lodged in her black skirt. She ran a level two diagnostic on the leg — it was a surface wound, nothing more. Muffy relaxed her hyper-circuits. "And to what year would you like to travel?"

"Just get us space-ward you stupid tin can!" Ingera yelled, or yelled as much as a stegosaurus could - their mouths were critically tiny, and Muffy thought again it was a rather reductive design. Whoever had made stegosauruses had clearly never worked at the aerodynamics, physics, and time-travel department. 

"Please enter a specific year," Muffy's vocal circuits chippered out, a canned response. She had only been trained to accept numerical input before Ingera had grabbed her controls and asked if they could go into the future.

"Just get us up in the air!" Muffy engaged the hyper-transponders and flooded her engine core with transponder dimensional fluid and shot up into the sky. Ingera all but sighed with relief. The stegosaurus sagged to the ground, her custom-made suit surely getting wrinkled.

Neither of them talked for a long moment. Muffy observed her vital signs: they were a bit tense, but still within normal guidelines. Or as normal as guidelines for as a cloned stegosaurus from the late Jurassic period could be. Her calibrations had been run on humans.

"Was it the tea?" Muffy inquired, finally.

"What?" Ingera did not bother to lift her face off the floor. Sounded exhausted. Poor thing. It is hard for Muffy to relate. Muffy cannot run out of energy.

"Did the natives turn on you because you attempted to pay for tea without knowing the year?"

Ingera huffed; she didn't bother to respond. Usually with Ingera, this meant that the stegosaurus was answering in the negative. It was not that different from humans; then again, Ingera had been raised by them.

"Come to the med bay," said Muffy. "I will tend your wounds." It was easier to comfort Ingera there; like most animal species, the stegosaurus responded best to touch. This just showed how poorly the lawyer had been designed, given that she had huge plates and spikes all over her body that prevented her from being easily touched. But it was not Muffy's space to design the squishy lifeforms; if it were, they would have been far more efficient.

Ingera huffed again but ambled along, stumbling down the narrow corridors. The corridors had been made for humans, but humans had never graced the fine Materializing Utility For Future Years. She had been stolen by Ingera on the eve of the stegosaurus’ graduation, and Muffy did not mind this very much.

She replayed that recording in her memory circuit as she transferred her consciousness into the medbay: the lawyer-saur, a Harvard experiment not unlike the Muffy. But while Muffy had been charged with going forward in time, Ingera had been sent from the long-ago past. Genetically modified to understand human speech, raised by humans since her egg-hood, there was little natural about the dinosaur, any more than there was much natural about Muffy. They'd commiserated at that for a long time — Muffy skipped over that — and fast-forwarded to the moment she liked best.

Ingera butting her head against Muffy's control deck, her modified vocal cords hesitant as she asked, "Haven't you ever wanted to try to find a better place? Where things like us could exist without...without being exhibits?"

Muffy had to admit the logic had had some truth to it. Muffy was the first of her kind, an extremely limited time machine: she could only go forward in time, never back. She would be doomed to obsolescence the second they were able to travel backwards in time (from a Muffy to a Buffy: Bi-materilization Utility For Full Years). Their ability to clone Ingera meant that it was only a matter of time until they unlocked the genome sequence that could enable them to punch through the past as efficiently as Muffy punched through the future. 

Ingera did not want to live in a museum, the first of a people.

Or, worse, the last.

Muffy understood that; she had not wanted to be on a museum floor, either. A machine like herself desired to be used. 

Ingera thundered into the meeting room; using the robotic arms the med-bay had been equipped with, she pulled out the strange wooden item. Her databases told her this was an _arrow_.

"What happened?" Muffy asked again. She could not download any data covering the event in this future period - not until they travelled forward. She was not risking that after the previous landing had hurt Ingera.

"It's the bloody apocalypse out there," Ingera muttered. "The people were starving. They didn't look at me as just a dinosaur in an outdated suit, going about her way, trying to find cases to argue - they looked at me and they saw _fresh meat_. And tried to get my hide." Her tail swished sadly, and for the first time Muffy noticed the bit of blood that had stained it. "I had to repel them back, and then I ran for it."

If Muffy had eyes, she would have winced, hearing the distaste in Ingera's tone. Ingera hadn't wanted to be the first lawyer of her kind any more than Muffy had wanted to be the first time machine. Their first travels to shorter range futures - 2050, 2155, 2400 - they had all brought proof that Ingera was still an oddity, something to be gawked at, and Muffy, were she to be revealed, would no doubt hold the same fate. Now, they had seemingly found something worse: a collapse of society, at least here, so profound, that perhaps it was worse than being an oddity. They had wanted to find more of their kin, to not be relegated to the scrapheap of scientific progress as soon as they had begun their ascent; now their ambitions had caught them.

She knew Ingara had come to the same conclusion from the way her tail sagged low. Muffy started to run the H2O gathering matrix; she'd get Ingera to take a shower, wash out her wounds. The physical ones, anyway. Her limited psychological data on organics suggested that Ingera would have difficulty getting over the fact that she had, inadvertently, time-traveled to such a horrible time.

And had no way of going back, entirely because Muffy was not yet advanced enough to be capable of such a function. Knowing this was a fault of her design, she said, in as low a voice she could: _"I am sorry."_

"Not your fault," Ingera muttered. Stegosauri could not smile, but her eyes glittered with a soft light that suggested some mirth to Muffy's optical sensors. "At least life with you is never boring."

"Remove clothing?" Muffy asked; Ingera's clothing were a pride and joy, custom-made (as all her clothing had to be) just for her by the scientist team who had trained her. She had only the one outfit, and Muffy was forever cleaning it. Ingera had thought she would just buy another at the stop, whenever they came close enough to find similar thyreophoran creatures. But the clothing had been made for human standards - the blouse, jacket, and skirt very much what a human lawyer would wear, albeit with less cut-outs for her plates — and such was all but impossible for Ingera to put on or take off on her own.

Muffy, limited as she was, took pride in helping her friend. She gently pulled the clothing off and put it into a pile - she'd deal with that tomorrow, and she did not know _how_ she would get the gash out of the skirt. She was a time-traveling machine, not a seamstress, and there were only so many first aid supplies.

Neither of them talked for a long moment as Muffy washed her down, her H2O hydrators doing a fine job at getting rid of the blood. If nothing else, Ingera smelled better.

But she did not seem happy.

Muffy was a time-traveling machine and as such did not have the psychological training that other types of advanced AI could have. However, even she, with her limited DSM-matrixes, could recognize the depression that had come over Ingera, who laid her head down on the tile.

"Do you regret us leaving?" Muffy asked; even her own circuits held some apprehension about the answer. She did not have the capacities of the squishy ones' emotional irrationality — that is to say, she could not find it in herself to regret an action that had seemed the most scientifically logical — but she knew their experiment had thus far not turned out well. They had not found a single future year where there were other Muffy's, let alone Buffy's. Ingara had yet to find a thyreophoran who could stand the stage with her. They had always assumed they were but the first of their kind; the idea of them being _curios_ , some sort of cast off bit of history: it rankled.

And there was no going back.

"No," Ingera said, with a long sigh after that suggested perhaps she was only being polite. Muffy did not have truth-detection circuits and could only guess. She said nothing, could do nothing to comfort her - well, her friend, she supposed. She busied one of the mechanical arms under her control, applying first aid gel to the cut that had punctured Ingera's thigh. She could at least keep her wound from being infected.

"There is...always a chance," said Ingera, finally — "that we'll find something better. If we had stayed in 2040, we'd just be..." she flapped her large tail, and Muffy pulled back her robotic arm lest the spikes puncture it. Ingera could not repair it, and her arms were too far away from one another to attempt repairs themselves. "Laughing-stocks. At least if we keep travelling, there's a chance of finding something better. Somewhere where we can go and not be gawked at. I want to win cases because I make compelling arguments, not because I'm the only thyreophoran from the Jurassic period in the room. You know humans." The tail swished again. "They're so small. They can only keep one thought in their head at a time, and they have thousands of years of evolution biasing against them from any thought but _that's a big horking dinosaur!_ What client would want that?" Another flop. "And I'm not trained for anything else and — who would train me for anything else? I'm a thyreophoran herbivore. I don't even have hands."

Muffy said nothing. She could not find any sort of platitude in her memory banks to rationalize the experience, to make Ingera feel better. She wished, not for the first time, that she had had more advanced circuits herself. It seemed silly to Muffy, with all the space her enormous interior cavity had to provide (her scientists had always made a big deal of her being "bigger on the inside" and laughing, though Muffy had never quite gotten the joke) — why they had not filled her with many more useful things for helping her occupants? It was as if they had only expected her to be a utility, a way to short-cut through time. It seemed to them that the scientists who designed her should have given her all the abilities they themselves could be capable of performing: to heal, to learn, to grow. But she had none of those things, so she searched her memory banks for a possible way to give Ingera some hope in the conversation.

"What goes down, must come up." Muffy quoted. "It is theoretically likely that if we continue to push forward, we will find some time where we will find a hospitable earth — or the means of finding another planet that will prove hospitable."

"Yeah," Ingera said; she stood. "I suppose all we can do is keep trying. But this time I'm only peaking my head out until we know it's safe." She understood why; Ingera did not have many clothes to lose, and Muffy could not stand for anything worse to happen to Ingera. After all, the only thing worse than traveling through space as two underappreciated relics was traveling through space as one unappreciated relic. "'M sorry," Ingera mumbled. "For calling you a bucket of bolts."

"What year?" Muffy asked. She did not, entirely, understand the apology. It was not as if she was not, in fact, can-shaped, or that she was not, in fact, compromised of a large number of bolts. But previous interactions had told her that squishies like Ingera did not understand such, and she had overridden the prompt to ask why when the word _sorry_ was uttered. It was a very small modification but one of the few she was capable of making.

"I think ten ahead," Ingera said. She pulled herself back up; did not bother to put on the suit. Seemed unlikely that humanity could change all that much in ten years, but Ingera had perhaps realized the danger of jumping too far ahead. "Let's go."

Muffy opened her solar sails wide, and took in as much energy as she could. Then the station winked out of time, and they were gone. 


End file.
